SEA Junior Scholar of the Month, September 2022: Alonzo Smith
How did you become interested in studying early American literature?
As an undergraduate student who majored in English Literature, my African American literature professor introduced me to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The vivid and gripping language of the texts, the plot twists, and the themes focused on evangelical hypocrisy endeared me to slave narratives especially. This inspired me to start with earlier periods, which led me to memoirs like Narrative of the Life of Venture Smith, Narrative of John Marrant, and a Narrative of Briton Hammon.
Who is your favorite early American writer, or what is your favorite early American text, and why?
I have quite a number of them. I love Olaudah Equiano. He also serves as a transatlantic and African Diasporic figure, not just an Early American one. Just as well, I love Jupiter Hammon’s and Phyllis Wheatley’s poetry because of their focus on the intersections of religion and resistance. Lately though, as I work on completing my dissertation, I reread Venture Smith and his slave narrative. He has now easily become my favorite early American author because of the way that he decolonizes conceptions of the early American Black family and how he negotiates his interiority, masculinity, and economics.
What are you currently working on?
I am currently working on my dissertation which I will complete by Fall 2022. While I do this, I am also tweaking a dissertation chapter focused on Venture Smith and his masculine subjectivity to submit to a peer reviewed journal. In the article titled “Papa’s Baby: Family, Gentility, and Manhood in Venture Smith’s Narrative,” I argue that Venture Smith utilizes a decolonial approach to assert his male subjectivity and self-fashion his identity. I also recently took part in the Caribbean Philosophical Association summer institute where I encountered a new author that I really appreciated during that seminar. Lewis R Gordon wrote Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization where he complicates definitions of colonized philosophies and reimagines liberation. This text was instrumental in me framing the theoretical approach I take to reread Jamaica Kincaid’s elegy My Brother: an essay that I am working on and will present at the West Indian Literature Conference October 13 – 15, 2022.
What is something you are reading right now (EAL related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
Currently, I am reading Toussaint Louverture’s memoir of his time in Haiti and the revolution he successfully launched to defeat slavery and liberate Haiti. I am particularly intrigued with the way that he frames honor by invariably mimicking white French masculinity and then subverting it to establish his own male identity. As well, as a person of Caribbean descent I am particularly interested in how identity and Blackness is constructed. Reading Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah has been particularly effective in this regard. In Americanah, Adichie critiques monolithic notions of Blackness, and implicitly demands a redefinition of this identifier beyond Americentric understandings of the term.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you, and why?
Yes, I like Frances Smith-Foster and her work on the early African American family especially. Smith-Foster destabilizes conceptions of the Black family, love, and resistance in Til Death Or Distance Do Us Part, and these are all topics that engage my interest as a junior Early American scholar. Additionally, I revere the work that she has done in recovering early texts and bibliographies written by and centered on African American women. I met her at a recent SSAWW conference in Baltimore and concluded that she was one of the most engaging, convivial, humorous, and humble individuals I had ever met. After meeting her, I understood why my Early American mentor, Theresa Gaul, had insisted that I meet her. I must say that is one thing I like about SEA. Everyone feels like family, and members are eager to mentor and network with other scholars and junior scholars.
Cassander Smith is also someone whom I admire and whose work I respect. The recent virtual symposium, Editing the Early Caribbean: 18th Century Anti-Racist Pedagogies, which she led and collaborated on with other scholars like Michael Drexler, was illuminating. Engaging with questions like how critical editions of early Caribbean texts provide avenues to build more inclusive ant-racist classrooms really forced me to wrestle with my own definitions of racist, anti-racist, and white-supremacy, and how I may unwittingly center racist and white-supremacist texts in my classroom.
Alonzo Smith is a PhD candidate in English at Texas Christian University.